Jefferson wanted Hemings to come back to Virginia with him, so much so that he took to bargaining with her about this. He well knew that in Virginia there were many other women, enslaved and not, who could satisfy any merely carnal impulses as soon as he returned to America. The problem was, however, that they would not actually have been Sally Hemings herself, a requirement that was evidently very important to him. Her siblings and other relatives seemed to have gauged this. As suggested earlier, their attitude toward Jefferson after Hemings’s return to Virginia is in perfect keeping with the idea that they believed he cared for her. If what had happened between them in France had been along the lines of more typical master-female slave sex, Hemings’s expressed desire to stay in the country, especially after she became aware that she was pregnant, would have been exactly what Jefferson needed. He could have left her in Paris with her quite capable older brother, helped the pair financially, and found James Hemings employment, thus ridding himself of a potentially embarrassing problem in a way that actually bolstered, instead of hurt, his image. History, and his philosophe friends of the moment, would have recorded that Jefferson (breathing the rarefied air of Enlightenment France) so identified with the Freedom Principle that he let go of two of his own slaves. He would have been a veritable hero.
Instead of doing that, Jefferson insisted on setting up an arrangement with a young woman that he knew could easily result in a houseful of children whose existence would be easily tied to him. He could not have foreseen in 1789 his eldest daughter’s problematic marriage, which eventually required her to spend more time with him than was normal, and complicated his life at Monticello with Hemings and their children. Even without knowing that, his resolution of his conflict with her created many other potential problems for his personal life and reputation that were entirely foreseeable. He accepted the risks and forged ahead. During the decades that followed their time in France, and after an extremely hurtful public exposure that threatened his stature and legacy, this most thin-skinned of individuals persisted on his course, ignoring his family’s wishes to send Hemings away, and having more children with her who were named in the same fashion as the older ones: for his important and favorite family members and his best friends.32 James Madison Hemings was born almost at the virtual height of the public and political scandal surrounding Sally Hemings. Jefferson continued on, guided by his own internal compass and, no doubt, his awareness that the woman being vilified in the press had given up to him a thing whose value he understood: her freedom. He knew very well that these people, really, did not know what, and whom, they were talking about.
If sex had been the only issue, it would have been a far simpler and more practical matter, for himself and his white family when they returned to Monticello, for Jefferson to have installed Hemings in one of his nearby quarter farms at the base of the mountain and visited her there when the mood hit him. Then his daughters, their children, and visitors would have had scant opportunity to come upon either Hemings or her children who looked so much like him. Instead, Jefferson arranged his life at Monticello so that Hemings would be in it every day that he was there, taking care of his possessions, in his private enclave.
What most disturbed contemporary commentators about the arrangement at Monticello was not that the master had a slave mistress but that she was not sufficiently hidden away.32 Hemings was a visible presence in his home when everyone knew that Jefferson had the resources to have her be someplace else. The racism and sexual hysteria this unleashed among white Americans was a thing to behold. It was common at the time, and remains so among many today, to construct whites who have sex with black people as inherently licentious, or as the victims of some version of sexual voodoo expressed crudely in the phrase “once you go black, you can’t go back.” If Jefferson had one enslaved African American mistress, he must have had a thousand. Yet, through all the talk during Jefferson’s lifetime of his “Congo Harem,” “Negro Harem,” and “African Harem,” only one woman’s name emerged: Sally. Jefferson’s enemies of the day could list each of Hemings’s children, their order of birth and ages, what her duties were at Monticello, but they could never produce the name of another specific woman to be a part of his alleged seraglio.
From her side, it was Hemings who backed down from her decision to stay in France in return for a life at Monticello in which Jefferson would be a very serious presence. While she certainly had another compelling reason for wanting to remain tied to the mountain—her family—she was, for a time, prepared to forgo a life with them, although she may not actually have believed that she would never see her family again. Enslaved people who ran away often had thoughts of reunions with loved ones under changed circumstances. It is harder to interpret her actions once she returned to America and before she left Monticello upon Jefferson’s death because in those years she was legally under his control. But during an almost twenty-year period of childbearing, she conceived no children during Jefferson’s sometimes prolonged absences from Monticello as he acted as a public servant, indicating that she had no other sexual partners.34 That could well have been at his insistence as much as her own personal desires. Still, the expectation of fidelity—on her part at least—suggests something about the nature of their relationship. Hemings was apparently not supposed to, or did not want to, be involved with another partner. Whatever she felt for Jefferson aside, she was not acting under the cover of Anglo-American marriage, which presumes that all the children of a marriage are the children of the husband. That legal presumption has enabled wives, in countless situations, to require husbands to pass along resources to children who were not their biological offspring. Hemings’s connection to Jefferson, held together totally by whatever was going on between them, was her children’s way out of slavery, so long as her children were his, too. She was apparently unwilling to do anything (as in having babies by other men) that might jeopardize that connection and bring the effects of partus sequitur ventrem back into her life.
Before Hemings died, she gave one of her sons as heirlooms personal items that had belonged to Jefferson, a pair of his eyeglasses, a shoe buckle, and an inkwell that she had kept during the nine years after his death. These artifacts—things she saw him wear and a thing he used to write words that would make him live in history—were seemingly all that she had left of him. Monticello and virtually all its contents were sold to pay debts or were in the control of his legal white family. These items were quietly passed down in the Hemings family until well into the twentieth century.35 Slavery and racism worked such a distortion of human emotions (and continue to do so) that we may not feel comfortable attaching to this gesture the first inference that we would draw if the man whose belongings Hemings carefully saved and passed on to her offspring had been an enslaved black man or if she had been a white woman, even an unmarried white woman, handling a white man’s possessions in this fashion. The meaning of her sister Martha’s valediction to Jefferson—her unfinished copying of a passage from one of his favorite books, Tristram Shandy—is easy to discern.36 Whether she knew the passage from her own reading, or whether she heard it first during the weeks that Jefferson helped to take care of her in her final days and may have read to her to keep her amused, she was attempting to tell him, and anyone who might read her transcription, what she felt as her life was ebbing away. It is both literal and literary, the very thing that historians love to see: words on a page that tell without much effort what the writer is saying. Words are not everything, and in the realm of deep emotion, quite often fail. Hemings’s action, which at the very least exhorted her descendants to both remember Jefferson and her connection to him, indicate that she wanted them to know he meant something to her. She had, after all, lived with him for decades, and he had given her valued children whom he had let go to make their way in the world, something her father had not done for her and her siblings. Jefferson had kept his promises to her.
Distortion of human feelings is not the same thing as the total destruction
of them. Sally Hemings, though enslaved, was a human being. Working backward to 1789 from either her death in 1835 or Jefferson’s death in 1826, one can say that sixteen-year-old-old Hemings’s instincts about how she might best shape her future in the context of her particular circumstances and needs were as sound as her older sister Mary’s instincts about Thomas Bell, developing at the same time on another continent. Hemings could not have known this as she treated with Jefferson at the Hôtel de Langeac, but at the end of her life she would be able to say that she got the important things that she most wanted.
18
THE RETURN
PARIS HAD NOT seen anything like it for decades. The chill winds assaulting the city seemed a harbinger of terrible things to come. The temperature dropped so low that the Seine froze solid enough to support both the carriages that slid boldly across it and the ice skaters who came out daily and nightly to take advantage of the unprecedented weather.1 James and Sally Hemings had not seen anything like it either, having grown up in a warmer climate, where freezing temperatures were not abnormal, but never so cold as what they experienced in the winter of 1788–89. This may have disconcerted them. Or the two young people could well have considered the spectacular arctic display a form of adventure, like the ice skaters gliding out onto the Seine. They were, apparently, able to do that. We know something of their health statuses from Jefferson’s records. When the Hemingses needed medical attention, he put them under the care of doctors or nurses and recorded his payments for those services in his memorandum books. The lack of such notations during this period suggests that brother and sister made it through their last winter in Paris with no serious bouts of sickness. As noted in chapter 11, Patsy and Polly were not so fortunate. They were ill with typhus for parts of the winter.2
Whatever the Hemingses felt about that winter, Jefferson, the Parisian for a time, ever enamored of the sun and warm weather, was deeply distressed. Despite his close affinity for Paris, its customs, architecture, cultural life, and the people he met there, he could hardly abide its weather, a part of nature he watched with obsessive farmerlike zeal in every place he lived for any stretch of time. Almost from the moment he arrived, he had been issuing periodic complaints to family and friends back home about just how cold and how gray was the climate and atmosphere in the city. Although he hated the cold, the insistent meteorologist in him was, nonetheless, excited about the extreme winter as a weather occurrence. He ordered a new pair of thermometers that could be placed outside and observed without “opening the window” and would show the temperature to twenty degrees Farenheit “below naught.” He wrote to his brother-in-law about the “Siberian degree of cold” the city was experiencing and noted that as early as November the temperature had plummeted to eight degrees.3 If Jefferson was anxious before to get himself, his daughters, and James and Sally Hemings back to America, the hard winter probably deepened his resolve.
The aberrant weather was about more than these temporary immigrants’ personal and physical inconvenience. Distress was everywhere, the hard winter having come upon the heels of a disappointing harvest and the institution of questionable economic policies that drove up the price of bread, the staple of life for the country’s poor. Thousands of people who had been living in Paris and its countryside were barely able to hold on. Social life began to break down under the weight of the unremitting deep freeze, starvation, poor housing, and a political system that was ill equipped to handle the crisis. Beggars, always a part of the city’s life, filled public spaces in even greater numbers, giving evidence of social deterioration to all who traveled the city’s streets. The “people,” however, were not merely helpless supplicants. They were angry. The desperately poor, along with the faltering working and small middle classes, came out in great numbers to protest the government’s failures to deal effectively with the shortages, developing a political critique along the way that would escalate into a full-fledged revolution by midsummer.4
One wonders whether the brutal winter, and the hardship it provoked in the general society, gave the Hemings siblings any pause about staying in a place where such things were even possible. That they contemplated staying in France at all suggests that they were an optimistic pair, not necessarily prone to thinking that because other people failed, they were destined to fail, too. Life was looking up for them at the time, with a steady salary in both of their hands, five years’ worth of contacts and experience in Paris, and an open avenue of freedom.
Volatile as the world outside their door must have seemed, the Hemingses were really just witnessing the start of the revolutionary era in France during that first half of the year. The violence in the country—the storming of the Bastille in July, bread riots, and the uprising of the peasantry in the villages surrounding the city—was a mere prelude to the more serious turn of events in the months immediately following their departure from France. Nine days after they left the city thousands of Parisian women marched to Versailles to protest the lack of bread, shouting within earshot of the royal family, “du pain, du pain!” The marchers, who had an extra measure of power because of the French military’s reluctance to fire on women, were promised bread. Only mildly appeased, they insisted that King Louis and Queen Marie Antoinette return to Paris with them to ensure the fulfillment of the promise. The justifiably frightened couple had no choice but to go, and they left under the escort of the then still highly regarded marquis de Lafayette, a man known to both Hemingses as a frequent visitor to the Hôtel de Langeac, taking meals that James Hemings prepared.5
The Hemingses were in a country on the precipice of truly earth-shattering changes, but the person closest to them, who knew the most about what was going on both in the streets and in the government—Jefferson—apparently did not really believe that. After viewing the political response to the fall of the Bastille, he pronounced with his usual implacable optimism, three days after the event, that the “power of the States is now I think out of all danger.” He seemed to believe that up until the time he left the country. “Tranquillity,” he wrote to Lucy Paradise as late as September 10, “is pretty generally restored in this country,” and then to Thomas Paine three days later,
Tranquillity is well established in Paris, and tolerably thro’ the whole kingdom; and I think there is no possibility now of any thing’s hindering their final establishment of a good constitution, which will in it’s principles and merit be about a middle term between that of England and America.6
Nothing could hinder this outcome except the hovering whirlwind that would descend soon after he left Paris. William Short, who knew him well, said that “Jefferson’s greatest illusions in politics…proceeded from a most amiable error on his part; having too favorable opinion of the animal called Man.”7
Jefferson enthusiastically supported the French Revolution, believing that changes were much needed in the country, and as with so many other things he deeply wanted to be true, he let his heart’s desire influence what should have been a more dispassionate analysis of how matters might settle themselves in that conflict. This natural politician and statesman followed the activities of the political elite as well as the ordinary people, who he instinctively understood would be the elite’s powerful counterpart, riding out into the streets to see the faces of the impoverished and enraged crowds that gathered to protest the government’s fecklessness. Even amid what looked like impending chaos, he assumed that the people’s wisdom would prevail and that all would be well in the end.
One of the more fascinating things to contemplate is what the enslaved people in Jefferson’s world, particularly those close to him like James and Sally Hemings, made of the strange blend of aristocrat and egalitarian in him. Whatever the limits of Jefferson’s personal egalitarianism, his ideas could not be, and ultimately have not been, contained within those limits. It is very likely that both Hemingses, like many during their time and afterward, understood that all who heard “all men are created equal” could make of those words what they wanted.
We do not know what specific opinions he offered to the pair about the political and social turmoil in Paris, but he surely spoke to them, or commented within earshot, about the extraordinary events that were taking place around them. As the head of the household he could do no less, if only to give assurances about their personal well-being. Though they were not the likely objects of political hostility, during the same month that the Bastille was overtaken, burglars broke into the Hôtel de Langeac three times. Jefferson asked for additional police protection and then had bars and bells put on the windows to keep out intruders and to alert the people in the house if anyone tried to get inside. Even if the burglaries were not overtly political acts, they were another sign to the Americans that they were in the midst of difficult times and were, to some degree, vulnerable.8
The public turmoil aside, the Americans had their own business to attend to, some of which offered its own brand of trouble. It is more usual to think of Sally Hemings in conflict with Jefferson over leaving France. She was not the only cause of concern. Jefferson’s own daughters were evidently giving him some moments of anxiety. While there is no question that he longed for home, and saw his leave as an occasion to put his financial affairs in order, his correspondence in 1788–89 clearly indicates that what worried him the most was that his daughters were coming of age in this foreign setting. Patsy was almost certainly the catalyst for his decision to seek a leave of absence. He was desperate to get her back home.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 46